The Smallest Life

This post talks about mental illness and life, just giving you a heads up.

Sometimes life serves you up something that has to be shared. And for me that usually comes when life gives you lemons. Cause sometimes you can’t make lemonade, sometimes it just all fucks up. You get citric acid in your eye and start flailing about blind and knocking awfully over-sweetened and pip-littered lemonade everywhere. You unwieldily try to run for the bathroom but run into a small child with pneumonia who falls over and starts crying. Now all the kids are crying and there’s some terse sounding woman berating you for your shoddy lemonade. What’s more you weren’t even supposed to be making lemonade today, you were supposed to be in Bali sipping G&Ts with your best mate Thea but that pneumonia ridden child is actually your child and so no Bali for you.

You are down for the proverbial life count.

And in the lemonade horror-story moments of life it is easy to feel alone.

Really

alone.

But you know what loneliness is allergic to? Share-iness*

So that’s why I think it’s important to share these horrifying citric nightmare moments.

And that’s why I’m sharing mine.

A week ago, I came back to the land of the free.

I was in a psychiatric hospital for 16 days.

I’ve never been in hospital before, and for me, that was the bottomiest bottom I’d ever experienced.

And in times like those I deal by making things. Songs, writings, cat-related business ventures in my head. Things like this video.

________.

And this video is many things.

A letter to myself. A letter that says sometimes you are fragile but you are also good.

A manifesto for strength in weakness. Bravery in vulnerability.

A hand stretching out into the void. A hand in absent space stretching out for another hand to meet it.

And an explanation. I know I have faded a lot lately. Been absent. Disappeared. This is one of those, it’s not you, it’s me moments that has validity. I’m sorry. You are not forgotten. I have been slaying dragons.

________

Thank you to all that I’ve had the fortune to hold dear for this trip. You keep me buoyant.

Special thanks to Paddy, who filmed and edited this for me, and provided hugs and ears and shoulders where necessary.

________

*Not a real word

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